I don't think these points bring anything new to the table: it seems
to me that these trade-offs are fairly well understood, even if not
talked about explicitly often. The other thing I'd observe is that,
ignoring the issue of performance, this is just a rehashing of the
much more general argument of explicit vs implicit. We can all
acknowledge that with liberal application of void and similar
functions, it's always possible to rewrite code relying on the
generalized version to use the specialized version. The question comes
down to that annoying need for throwing in void.

How do we determine whether we should use generalized or specialized
functions? I'm starting to follow this procedure:

If there's a performance concern, let that take precedence. Having
accidentally slower code due to a desire to make code shorter/more
beautiful is a bad trade-off.

If there's no performance issue (like with runConduit), it's a
completely subjective decision. The facts I'd look for are examples
of bugs people run into with the generalized version.

On the bug front, I think it's important to point out that, in my
experience, the bugs are less likely to appear during initial code
writing, but during code review and refactoring. When you write
something like when foo getLine, you've probably gone through the
thought process "I'm just trying to give the user a chance to hit
<ENTER>, and I'm intentionally ignoring whatever the user entered."
But during refactoring that may not be so obvious, and some ignored
user input may be surpring. By contrast, when foo (void getLine)
stands out more blatantly.

Finally, in comparing this to the general discussion of explicit vs implicit, I want to point out that there's no "one right answer" here. This falls into the same category of "do I define a typeclass/interface?", which is always a judgement call. You can give general guidelines, but I think we can all agree that both extremes:

Never define a typeclass for any purpose

Define every single function to be a member of a typeclass

Are ridiculous oversimplifications that we should not advocate. Same
thing applies here: there are times when a generalized type signature
makes sense, and times when it doesn't.

Conduit

As an aside, if anyone is wondering where this random blog post came
from, while working on a presentation on Conduit and Yesod, I
revisited
an issue from a few months ago
about deprecating older type synonyms
(PR now available),
and was reminded of the ongoing debate around which of the following
is the correct runConduit signature:

The current situation of () for input and Void for output has been
around for a while, and originated with discussions around the
conduit/pipes dichotomy. (And in fact,
pipes today has the same split.)
I'm not convinced that the split between input and output is a great
thing, so the arguments in favor of each of these signatures seem to
be:

Backwards compatibility

Generalize, avoiding any need for explicit conversion ever, and
avoid the ()/Void debate entirely
* Note that we won't really avoid the debate entirely, since
other parts of conduit will still need to indicate "nothing
upstream" or "nothing downstream"

Most explicit about what we're doing: we guarantee that there will
never be any real values yielded from upstream, or yielded
downstream. You can look through the conduit codebase for usages of
absurd to see this play out.

More explicit, but less cognitive overhead of learning about
Void.

I think for now I'm leaning towards (1), as backwards compat has been
a big guiding principle for me, but the debate is still raging for me.